Utahn recalls terror of Iraq kidnapping

OREM — Random checkpoints are part of life in Iraq, so Provo's Will Van Wagenen didn't look up from the back seat of the car until it stopped in front of the gunmen and their rickety old Volkswagen sedan.

The former Brigham Young University soccer player was curious but not too worried even after one of the gunmen climbed into the passenger seat.

The man said he was conducting a border patrol investigation and ordered the driver to follow the Volkswagen, which looked to Van Wagenen like it had been on its last leg for 20 years.

Then the Volkswagen pulled off the highway and into the desert.

"That's when I started to get really scared," Van Wagenen said. "I realized we were either being kidnapped or taken to a remote spot to be shot and killed."

The kidnappers took Van Wagenen, a graduate of Cottonwood High School and Harvard Divinity School, and three of his friends — Peggy Gish of Athens, Ohio, and two Iraqis — to a safe house either in northwest Iraq or across the border into Syria on Jan. 27.

Two days later, the captors released Gish and one Iraqi man, but they held Van Wagenen and another Iraqi man until Feb. 4.

The chilling capture left Van Wagenen, 29, feeling guilty and ultimately grateful to be safe back in Utah.

Van Wagenen had been in Iraq before, working with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a human-rights organization founded by pacifists to protect civilians in violence-torn areas around the world.

Soon after he returned from that four-month stay in 2005, four CPT members were kidnapped, and one, 54-year-old Tom Fox of McLean, Va., was killed.

So why on earth did Van Wagenen go back?

"I decided to go back because we wouldn't be in Baghdad," he said. "We were going to the north, where a Kurdish government has created a really secure area. It's almost like a completely different country.

"I really didn't anticipate any safety issues."

In fact, Van Wagenen recalled feeling sick to his stomach as he sat in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, on the night before he first went into Iraq in 2005.

As he returned to Iraq last November, he felt calm and safe.

"That's obviously ironic," he said.

The abduction

For two months, Van Wagenen did work safely in Kurdish Iraq. Then he decided to leave.